New AMD Processor
nicstt
Posts: 11,715
in The Commons
Damn, this looks like it just might be my next system.
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Yeppers. Not sure I need to go full EPYC/32 core for my personal rendering build, but yeah the fact that Threadripper's 16 cores are coming down the pipeline soon has convinced me to wait. I was going to grab a Ryzen 7 system, but then I heard about the newer Threadripper processor.
Realistically we are probably looking at Q3 for significant availability, it all depends on now many systems will be available for launch, along with the x399 platform motherboard availability. Intel will be launching x299 as well this year, so yeah things are getting very interesting at the moment.
EPYC's (aka Naples) 128 PCIe lanes is is simply awesome. Threadripper has 64 of those... one of the articles I read recently indicated that 44 of those 64 lanes on Threadripper were PCIe slot specific, with (presumably) the remainder going towards storage and other uses.
I'd like to be excited about the new AMD Radeon Vega cards that'll hit the market in the next month or two, but I like Iray too much...
That kernel compile... whew. AMD isn't holding back with its new releases, that's for sure.
I wonder how much $$$ for CPU and Motherboard......
These days i have no clue what anyone is talking about on computer jargon... I built by system back before dual cores came out and could never afford to upgrade much until I bought an off the shelf model that was better in every way than my old system a couple of years ago, I need to learn so I can build a better one again lol.
Wow! 16 core, 32 threads and a 1 TB video card readying too. AMD is going to get affordable big time computing power in consumer hands. Now I hope that sort of innovation follows onto tablets and phones which have been lackadaisical as the businesses have been ploddiingly doing the minimal HW upgrades to milk the masses for the past 5 - 7 years. No competition really.
Yeah, it looks like all of AMDs demos at the Analyst day went off without a hitch, at least that I saw anyways (connection dropped a couple of times.). The Machine Learning benchmark part of the presentation was similarly impressive, as was the point when they showed off Vega Frontier doing some video editing and raytracing.
For those that don't know what we are referring to, at one point AMD stacked a Dual Naples/EPYC against 2 of Intel's top server processors that are currently available, doing Linux compile for 8 units/packages simultaneously (not sure the exact term they used). Dual Naples/EPYC beat the two Intel processors by close to 50% (15.4 seconds vs 22.7 seconds if I remember correctly). They then stacked up a single Naples against two of Intel's midrange server processers (at roughtly the 50% mark of Intel's product range), representing what is in most servers today. Again AMD won, something like 31 seconds for a single Naples vs 34 seconds for the two Intel processors. At this point in the presentation, AMD was making a big deal about how much less space a single chip motherboard with associated memory requires vs 2 processors, and how this might be very appealing to those looking for 'basic' server setups such as those used onsite by a number of smaller businesses.
Intel has new server chips coming down the pike too, so I expect some performance improvements on the server front from Team Blue, and some direct comparisons when the new chips are able to be compared directly. But yeah, AMD really has executed well to bring the company back into the high end game this year. Pretty good for a company that is dramatically outspent/out-earned/outsized by both of it's major competitors. We are talking competitors that are each well over double their size, at least on the balance sheets.
I'm sure AMD wasn't happy about needing to abandon the high end market in the first place (due to lack of parity with their competitors), but they were very clear today that they intend to stay there now that they've been able to claw their way back. Of course, whether they can continue to hang on, with both competitors working to maintain their dominance by introducing newer and more attractive products, well that's been AMD's story for decades now. They've been declared down for the count more than once, yet here we are today with Threadripper and EPYC, and I look forward to seeing what Vega can do.
Of course, Intel, AMD and Nvidia all love to cherry pick benchmarks to showcase their products the best, but yeah, as I said in the other thread, I haven't seen so many exciting products from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia simultaneously in a long time. Maybe since the introduction of Thunderbird (the original Athlon) waaaay back when? And with Nvidia bringing Volta into play at some point this year, it'll just get even more interesting. Intel has Optane in the wings, and THAT is also very exciting...
And 7nm is just around the corner. AMD is shooting for 2018 (probably Q4 2018 would be my guess, that's a pretty ambitious goal) for their 7nm process, and Intel and Nvidia will be looking at die shrinks as well in the coming months/years. Yeah, things are very interesting at the moment...
The 7nm is interesting because Intel is apparently having issues with their 10nm process... which makes me wonder where TSMC/GloFo/Samsung are with their process tech.
I read it has 44 PCIe lanes which, I forget who in the forum, was saying 40 or more lanes enable one to use 4 video cards in a PC.
This article is approaching 2 months old now. It features a diagram of an X390/X399 motherboard showing 4 PCIe full length slots, along with another diagram that shows off the i/o. Everything that I've read about Threadripper has panned out so far, so this still looks right to me.
http://wccftech.com/rumor-chipset-diagrams-amds-x390-x399-motherboards-leak-hint-existence-lga-socket/
Ah yes, back in the "good old days" when intel paid (and/or strong armed) retailers into placing Intel products in prominent locations and discouraging consumers from buying AMD (or just flatout paying retailers to not cary AMD products). I remember many a time that Best Buy employees tried convincing me about how much "better" the Pentium 4 was vs the Athlon 64. I always chuckled a bit on the inside.
AMD is also releasing Ryzen APU's apparenty "Ryzen APUs that pair four cores and eight threads with a Vega-based GPU. AMD claims a "50 percent increase in CPU performance and over 40 percent better graphics performance, at half the power of its previous generation."
Hmmm...that sounds like an electric bill I could afford. The Epyc with 32 cores and 64 threads and 6 video cards is impressive but nothing I anything I could afford even 10 years after their release because of the electic bills.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the Ryzen+Vega APU's so that I can finally get a new desktop replacement laptop (ye olde 17" Toshiba served me well for just shy of a decade, but it finally died so I"m on my 13.5" 2 in 1 now, which was never intended to be my main laptop), although if they were to release a Threadripper laptop with a mobile version of the 1080Ti, I'd have a hard time saying no to that.
Hopefully AMD and it's partners can get us some new Ryzen/Vega laptops in time for Christmas...
The attached slide is probably one of my favorites from the F.A.D. presentation yesterday. This is for full EPYC, but it'd be fun if Threadripper could do 6 GPU's... I'm guessing with half the PCIe of EPYC (64 vs 128) that we won't be seeing a 6 GPU capable mobo for Threadripper, but one can dream!
Here's a nice summary of the F.A.D. presentation yesterday:
http://wccftech.com/amd-fad-vega-frontier-edition-threadripper-epyc-ryzen-mobile/
Laptops/Desktops can be built to handle something that no Smartphone or smaller tablet can handle without making them so big that you might as well use a larger device. That thing is heat. It's simply not practical to push speeds and number of cores beyond what they currently have for that reason.
I know that's still the case now but the smaller dies are dropping energy usage so heat disappation needs are decreasing.
...yeah 64 cores/128 threads on the Epyc/Naples CPU is nice but as I read it is designed to interact only with AMD GPUs, so rather unless for for Iray GPU rendering. Now for biased CPU based render engines like Carrara Renderman/3DL and Vue it could be a different story. As Carrara makes use of as many cores as you have, it would be like a very brief mini light show with 128 multi coloured tiles flashing across the screen.
...and 16 channel memory with a capacity for 32 memory sticks on the MB. Can you say a deskside mini supercomputer? Of course Daz, Carara, and Vue would need to support Linux natively.
Asus is already teasing us with a ROG Ryzen laptop...
http://wccftech.com/asus-teases-worlds-first-amd-ryzen-powered-gaming-laptop/
nice lappy, if that's your thing. :)
What I like is their Infitiny Fabric. Ryzen CPU's are basically two CCX block (4 cores) joined by infinity fabric. Naples and ThreadRipper will be the same. More CCX blocks joined by infinity fabric. Vega will be the first GPU to use inifinity fabric. Eventually, they'll be able to put CPU+GPU+RAM, all on the same chip. This allows them to make more modular components. This is how they're getting high yields. Because the parts are smaller and with HBM2 for GPU (the memory controller is almost completely gone with HBM leaving more room for the GPU), they can expand the die of the components meaning even higher yields, but most importantly higher speeds. This is how they want to get to 7nm. This is how they took a GPU from two generations ago to build Fiji (Fury X) and leapfrog the current generation at the time. They have now done the same with Vega except the architecture is completely new and they didn't use infinity fabric on GPU until now. It'll be interesting to see what kind of speed it'll generate. We do know that it'll be faster than the 1080. Will it be faster than the Ti? The Xp?
Zen+ is supposed to come out sooner than we expect. Basically optimized Ryzen chips. Zen 2 is 2019 and Zen 3 is 2020. Lisa Su said they have a large team working on Zen2. Can't wait.